


when all the wild summer

by runobody2



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, F/F, rescued from canaan house by BoE before gideon's sacrifice AU, twenty years older but are they any wiser?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26105191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runobody2/pseuds/runobody2
Summary: That set Harrow’s expression into a smirk.  “Stop deflecting, Nav.  Starting to feel old?  You ought to ask Camilla for some tips the next time we see her, I think she’s aged better than you.”Which was outrageous.  Not that Camilla wasn’t smoking, she totally was.  But it was the principle of the thing.  “Harrowhark,” Gideon said.  “In twenty years Camilla is going to be impossible to distinguish from a prune that has been left out in the sun for too long, andIwill be routinely sought by—magazine photographers.  Desperate for content to fill their MILF spreads.  And nobody is going to believe that we’re actually together and will instead assume that you’ve hired me, because you are going to look like an even more desiccated prune than Camilla.”This was all probably untrue, and even if it wasn’t, if past experience were to serve, Gideon would somehow be incomprehensibly attracted to the look.  She wasn’t going to mention that last part.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 20
Kudos: 134





	when all the wild summer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [outlaw_baby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outlaw_baby/gifts), [lowbrw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowbrw/gifts), [FailedALIAS](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FailedALIAS/gifts).
  * Inspired by [this haunting's anatomical](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26051779) by [runobody2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/runobody2/pseuds/runobody2). 



> is it gauche to do a remix of my own work? oh well, i think this fits better than a series.
> 
> THAT WAS: Ianthe POV AU fic where harrow still doesn’t remember gideon twenty years after lyctorhood
> 
> THIS IS: Gideon POV, TOTALLY SEPARATE AU where everyone got rescued from canaan house by blood of eden before gideon’s sacrifice, twenty years later. both are standalone, though obviously the other one is darker, if that affects your reading order at all. you do you though!

When Gideon returned to the sun-baked market square, all the hair at the back of her neck was matted to her skin with sweat, and Harrow had just made it to the front of the line for flatbreads and was now inclining her head mildly at some joke the vendor was making, clearly in the universal style of an apologetic customer serviceperson. This first observation was easily explained by the fact that Gideon had probably never encountered any location as filthily hot and moist as their current planet, excepting certain nether regions depicted in some of her danker pornographies.

The second observation was less easily explicated. If you had asked Gideon Nav at most points in the first two decades of her life if the scenario previously described was possible, she would have concluded _hell no_. Firstly because she knew Harrowhark Nonagesimus was a creature incapable of existing in direct sunlight without burning up into a malevolent little pile of ash, like a vampire, or a demon with a particular weakness to sunlight.

Secondly, she was never even going to encounter a customer serviceperson because she would never leave the Ninth (or let Gideon leave), and the Ninth was a planet untouched by customer servicepeople, or for that matter, market capitalism. And even if some customer serviceperson were to manage through deeply unfortunate circumstances to both encounter Harrowhark and manage to displease her, faced with her grim visage, they would surely know to leap directly over the apologetic joke phase of their script and into the most debased but ineffectual groveling of their lives.

That was the first two decades of Gideon’s life. She had encountered in her most recent two decades much that she could not have thought to imagine in her childhood: that she might witness Harrow under almost every weather and shade in the universe; that she and Harrow could leave the Ninth, and the violent ease with which they might become unmoored from their bonds and responsibilities there; that she might wake every morning knowing the enormity with which she loved Harrow and not wither under the weight of it.

That the actually inexplicable thing about this situation was that Harrow had been in line already when Gideon had left forty minutes ago, and so it must have been moving at a genuinely despicably slow pace. Nonetheless, by the time Gideon had finished cataloguing Harrow’s face, with its slightly irritated tension, looking warm as a bud in the damp rose-scented air—Harrow had commenced exchanging money for goods and services and spotted her to boot.

“What took you so long?” she said, when she’d reached Gideon’s spot at the thinning edge of the crowd. She handed Gideon her flatbreads. “They’d run out of the raisin flavor, so I got you cinnamon sugar. Don’t try to pretend that you would have wanted something else as your second-choice flavor, I know you and your— _sweet tooth_.”

Harrow said _sweet tooth_ the way most people said _chlamydia_. (She herself was holding her favorite flavor, _completely fucking plain_ ). But she was also right. Maybe Gideon needed to start switching up her taste in foods. Or she could just let it happen, and respond to Harrow’s question.

“Sorry, this whole city is built on like a dozen hills. Stack enough inclines and it can slow down even the fittest warrior babe.” Gideon tore off a chunk of her flatbread; it was perfectly scrumptious in her mouth, blistered to a crisp on the outside but toothsome on the inside.

Harrow’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. “Was your knee aching again?”

Yes, it had been her knee, which had begun occasionally to misbehave since she fractured it in a fight with a Herald two years back. Harrowhark Nonagesimus had probably sensed this because she was better attuned to blood in the water than a rabid, twice-starved piranha, which had been spliced with a shark.

“It wasn’t my knee,” Gideon said out loud.

“You didn’t have to take all of my bags as well as yours,” Harrow said. She sounded mostly dubious, which was fine, Gideon could deal with the occasional dubious Harrowhark as she had been doing for basically her entire life, or all of it that mattered. But in the shifting of her gaze Gideon thought she caught what might actually be worry, which felt beyond standing.

“Please,” said Gideon, and flicked Harrow in one pathetic bicep. “Like you could have carried them with your sad soggy towel arms.”

That set Harrow’s expression into a smirk. “Stop deflecting, Nav. Starting to feel old? You ought to ask Camilla for some tips the next time we see her, I think she’s aged better than you.”

Which was outrageous. Not that Camilla wasn’t smoking, she totally was. But it was the principle of the thing. “Harrowhark,” Gideon said. “In twenty years Camilla is going to be impossible to distinguish from a prune that has been left out in the sun for too long, and _I_ will be routinely sought by—magazine photographers. Desperate for content to fill their MILF spreads. And nobody is going to believe that we’re actually together and will instead assume that you’ve hired me, because you are going to look like an even more desiccated prune than Camilla.”

This was all probably untrue, and even if it wasn’t, if past experience were to serve, Gideon would somehow be incomprehensibly attracted to the look. She wasn’t going to mention that last part.

Harrow was scoffing beside her. Years and years, and the high contemptuous note of it hadn’t changed. Hearing it felt like sliding on an old glove, which probably said something concerning about one or both of their temperaments. “Is that a white hair I see?” Harrow was saying. “Next you’re going to be telling me you want to retire. What am I going to say to the recruits? We aren’t in the Ninth anymore, I can’t just tell them you’ve been reassigned to the furthest-afield leek farm.”

“Careful, babe,” Gideon said cheerfully. “I’ve read enough comics to know that the minute I start talking about retiring is the minute before I get tragically shanked.”

“Over my dead body,” Harrow said, damn near affectionate.

Gideon remembered then, as she hadn’t for some time: Canaan House, the bone dome, the metal spikes she had been about to impale herself on before their eleventh-hour rescue by Blood of Eden. All this morbid’s got her feeling sentimental; she couldn’t shake the Ninth, after all. She remembered the time, many years ago now, when she had woken in the middle of the night to find Harrow awake and looking back, and she had been suddenly so desperate to tell her— _you know I would have done it, right?_

“What?” Harrow had said. Not her sharpest moment, but it was probably 3 A.M.

“At Canaan House, when Cytherea—I would have fallen onto those spikes, and I would have wanted you to eat me. It wouldn’t have been hard, even. It would have been a good way to go.”

“Gideon,” Harrow had said. “I am glad more than anything that you did not. You said it was going to be the cruellest thing anyone had ever done to me, and you would have been right. And I would have fucking dragged you back from the grave, just to make you regret it.

“We’re alive. Despite the consistently long odds,” Harrow had continued, with only a whisper of bitterness. “You have to be alive with me.” And then, very softly, “I’m scared too,” which was shattering; and then she had held Gideon’s hand all night in the dark.

It’s a whole load of bullshit that all this necromancer and cavalier stuff, which Gideon had come to relatively late in life, turned out almost immediately afterwards to be mostly a big ploy for her death. And now an unfulfilled ploy, at that, another broken category left behind them. But Harrow’s always going to be her necromancer. Harrow—

Harrow’s trying to get her attention. “Griddle?” she said. “Don’t tell me your encroaching physical deterioration has become tragically paired with dementia.”

“Sorry,” said Gideon. Just because she could, she bent her head, and Harrowhark tilted hers to allow Gideon to place a brief kiss on her mouth. It was just the promise of warmth—and really, Gideon didn’t need it, she was already burning up—but she forgot, for a moment, the whole crowded market of people who were unaware that they had just witnessed a minor miracle.

Then Gideon said, because she was thirty-eight and had never learned a lost cause, “Anyways, I am not physically or mentally deteriorating, and I was not late because I was favoring my knee.”

“I am waiting with bated breath to discover the true reason for your delay,” said Harrowhark, who was thirty-seven and had never learned how not to be a little shit.

“You see,” said Gideon, beginning to bullshit wildly. “I actually had to visit basically every inn in the city.” She turned to leave the market then, and Harrow slipped into place by her side. The narrow streets stretched before them, as complexly organic as a bramble thicket.

“Did you?” said Harrow. “I suppose that instead of bemoaning your soon-to-be-decrepit body, I ought to be congratulating you on your acquisition of inhuman levels of speed, or efficiency. Probably speed.”

Gideon could not be dissuaded from the telling of lies. “You’d never guess it, but every single place I visited was totally full. Wild to say, but in the entire city there was only one open room. Furthermore,” Gideon continued, with a sideways grin, “ _there was only one available bed._ ”

Harrow’s lip barely twitched, but it didn’t have to do more. When she had been eighteen Gideon had thought she had known every expression that had ever crossed Harrowhark’s face, and all of them were nasty. She has since collected a fuller set, even if she had had to pass out, overstimulated, several dozen times to do it.

“So long as you aren’t going to tell me next that this single bed was twin-sized.” Harrow said, dryly. “Or that the room was let for suspiciously cheap, due to rumors that it’s haunted by particularly rancorous revenant, of the sort that might seek to accost an innocent young maiden in the night, such that she might be inveigled to seek out another’s arms for comfort. . . or alternately that this revenant was in the habit of causing freezing cold chills that would force her to huddle with whomsoever was available for warmth. Scratch that last part, this place is so hot that that would actually seem convenient.”

“Nah,” said Gideon, easily. “I know what you like. Don’t worry, this place actually _is_ cold as the grave, and they have a full bath, and I made them bring me up so I could check to make sure that the blinds go completely dark, even though it was an obnoxious request. Anything for you, my twilit crone. And it’s a queen bed, actually.”

“Well then,” said Harrowhark. “At such great risk to my virtue, too. But I suppose we’ll just have to share.”

And they did.

* * *

One that is ever kind said yesterday:  
‘Your well-belovéd's hair has threads of grey,  
And little shadows come about her eyes;  
Time can but make it easier to be wise’  
. . .  
Heart cries, ‘No,  
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.  
Time can but make her beauty over again:  
Because of that great nobleness of hers  
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,  
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways  
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.’

—W. B. Yeats

**Author's Note:**

> for emily, sabrina, and ross, so that they may grant me indulgences for my crimes. love you all.
> 
> i know this seems suspicious since both this fic and the one i wrote that it is a remix of have a bed-sharing joke, but i actually do not like logistical bedsharing fic, i swear. i mean, good for you if you like them, i hope they bring you much joy, but personally i think they are a little corny. maybe if characters weren't wusses they would just choose to share a bed of their own free volition.
> 
> find me at [jade-ellsworth on tumblr](https://jade-ellsworth.tumblr.com), where i chat often about harrow the ninth!


End file.
